Where Are Monsters in Dreams
by Monophylos
Summary: A short story set over a period of decades before "Something a Little More Plain, Something a Little More Sane", telling the story of one of its minor characters as he witnesses the rise and fall of the human town of Ebottsville, enduring recurring nightmares of monsters that end only when the monsters themselves emerge from the Underground.
1. Chapter 1

**Where Are Monsters in Dreams**

Part 1

When Henry Darzens was a young boy he dreamed of monsters. It is probable that most young children like Henry dream of monsters, both frightening and friendly, and then run to tell their parents the next day what the monsters were like. Henry had only his father to tell—influenza had taken away his mother before he was even old enough to remember her—and his father was a dour and laconic audience, but still Henry would eagerly describe the previous night's dreams over the breakfast-table and his father would nod and grunt and occasionally say, "That's very interesting, Hank." Henry dreamed of talking elephants after reading about Babar; he dreamed of giant rabbits after watching "Harvey"; he dreamed of nerkles and seersuckers after a schoolteacher introduced him to Dr. Seuss.

Occasionally, though, Henry Darzens would dream of different monsters. There was something about the dreams themselves, too, that was different; they were short but extraordinarily clear, and they would linger in his memory long after other dreams had faded. Once he saw a snow-covered town and a group of dog-like creatures in armor, standing together outside and greeting each other with joyful barks. Another time he thought he saw a vast cavern, with vine-covered pillars towering over the tiny figure of a dark-haired child in a green and yellow sweater, lying face down on the cavern floor and weeping. When Henry woke from that dream he found his eyes too were wet. His father didn't like hearing about that dream, only telling Henry curtly to stop blubbing over nothing.

Yet another dream was worse, far worse. Henry found himself staring into a ruined face, stark white like a crookedly grinning skull, with cracks running up and down from the creature's empty black eyesockets. The grinning mouth opened and words came out, words that sounded like whispers and static and nonsense, and then Henry saw the creature stumble backward and fall down, down, down, still grinning, still speaking nonsense, into a light so blinding that even in a dream Henry could scarcely bear to endure it, and the _light_ was tearing the creature to _pieces—_

When Henry bolted awake, still shaking with terror, he found he'd wet the bed. In desperation he tried to sneak the damp, clammy sheets out of his room but his father caught him. He backhanded Henry hard enough to knock him back down onto the bed and warned him not to do it again.

The next night Henry had another dream, but it was even worse this time. He saw, staggering backward from the hulking shadow of an unseen figure, a young girl with a ribbon in her hair, her eyes streaming with tears and wide with fear. "I'm sorry," Henry heard the shadow say in a deep rumble, and then a red trident impaled the girl in the chest and red blood spurted from her mouth—

He woke once again to urine-soaked sheets. He didn't try to hide them this time, but resolved to tell his father squarely. Henry wanted so to be brave but he couldn't keep it up, and halfway through his confession he began weeping—

"What have I told you about crying? Crying over a _dream?_ " his father yelled, and Henry could still smell on his breath the whisky from the night before. "Come here. I'll put a stop to this. It's time you grew up a bit." His father yanked him into the bathroom, ordered him to stand with his back to the wall, and then lashed him fifteen times with his leather razor strop.

Henry wet the bed no more after that. Nor did he again dream of monsters, for a very long time.

* * *

Henry Darzens's father died in 1960, at the age of fifty-five, when Henry was almost sixteen. His father had been up to a more than a quart a day by then, and his death surprised no one. When Henry saw his father's body lying in its coffin, the jaundiced skin restored by the undertaker's arts to a mockery of its original health, Henry felt a moment of grief; but then he remembered that he was almost a grown man now, and that it was wrong for a grown man to cry. The stab of grief faded.

* * *

Henry Darzens moved in with the only close relative he had left in the city of Highlands, his maternal grandmother, a diminutive but energetic old woman who smoked a Lucky Strike after every meal and regaled him with stories about the days of her youth when she left Highlands out of boredom and traveled to the East Coast. Henry graduated from high school with indifferent grades and then took whatever work he could find in the city: construction, driving, warehouse work. He continued to live with his grandmother, for he had come to be fond of the talkative old woman and felt obliged to look after her in her declining years, after she had looked after him.

For several years Henry was comfortable enough but the vagaries of the economy caught up to him. Paying work became scarce, and Henry found himself unemployed for longer and longer stretches between jobs. He grew fretful, and entertained vague ideas about leaving Highlands to try his luck in another city, but he stayed put and hoped for a change of fortune. And in his twenty-sixth year, the change came: the state's most profitable corporation, the Upland Tungsten Mining Company, announced plans to invest in the construction of a ski resort on Mount Ebott, thirty-five miles to the north of Highlands. Upland's press releases extolled the beauty of the mountainous landscape, the perfection of the mountain's snowy slopes, the millions of dollars that would be injected into the local economy and the hundreds of jobs that would be created. A new town would be created, Ebottsville, to house the new resort's workforce and serve the influx of tourists that Upland was certain their new resort, which they named Mountain Haven, would bring to Mt. Ebott.

Henry read the newspaper article describing the planned resort to his grandmother over afternoon coffee and declared his intention to apply for construction work on the resort as soon as it was available. He expected his grandmother to be pleased, but instead the old woman scowled at him.

"Damn fool big-city investors who don't know anything about that damn mountain," she said, punctuating her malediction with an aggressive puff on her cigarette. "If you've got any sense at all, Hank, you'll stay away as far away from this 'Mountain Haven' as possible."

"But why?" he asked, stunned by her response. "I mean, kids in school used to tell ghost stories about Mt. Ebott, but that's just kids talking."

"You should heed those ghost stories, young man," said his grandmother. "Mt. Ebott is not a place where men stay healthy for long."

She said nothing more about it, but the conversation stuck with Henry well into the night. As he tried to sleep he tried to think of everything he'd ever heard about Mt. Ebott. There wasn't much aside from schoolyard gossip about hauntings and disappearances.

Well, there was that one time three years ago when a fellow construction worker offered to take Henry along on a hunting trip near the mountain with a few other chums. Henry didn't care for hunting but he didn't want to say that aloud, so he politely declined. The hunting party departed a week later; the next day it returned, but Henry's coworker was not among them. They never did find his body...

Henry shook his head. He was planning to go to Mt. Ebott to _work,_ with hundreds of other people around, not to wander around in the snow with a gun and a few beery workmates. It was just a job, like any other job he'd ever had.

Eventually he did go to sleep. That night he dreamed of his old coworker. But he was dead, with a peaceful expression on his dead face and three bloody wounds in his chest, and strange clawed hands were gently laying the body in an oddly shaped grey coffin. The hands closed the coffin with a lid in whose center was inset a yellow heart. "I'm sorry," said a familiar voice in a deep rumble.

* * *

Three weeks later came the first advertisements in the newspapers for work on the Mountain Haven resort. After his grandmother's strange reaction earlier to news of the project Henry tried to keep his intentions to himself, but he was too careless to maintain the secret for long, and his grandmother overheard one of his phone calls inquiring about employment.

She was quiet during lunch, quiet in the afternoon and quiet over dinner, breaking her silence only to ask for salt and pepper. She smoked multiple cigarettes, lighting one off the end of another with shaking hands. When the meal was over Henry was about to withdraw to his room but his grandmother stopped him. "There is a story I must tell you," she said, "a story passed down to me by my own maternal grandmother, Rachel, when I was a girl and she was almost ninety. It is a story I believe. Please listen to it before you make a terrible mistake."

Henry listened as his grandmother told Rachel's tale. In the valley where the new town of Ebottsville was to be built there was once a village named St. Florian, a tranquil place where beautiful yellow flowers grew in abundance. Rachel had been born in that village and lived there uneventfully until she was about ten, when down from the mountain descended a monster of frightful aspect, a horned and fanged beast with the head of a goat, clad in purple robes bearing the creature's diabolical insignia on its front, flying or rather floating through the air and bearing in its arms the dead body of a young boy.

"All the villagers knew the child," Henry's grandmother said. "He had run away from home about three years before and disappeared. His name was Chara."

What the flying beast had done with the boy, or what it intended to do with his body, nobody in St. Florian could guess, but when they saw the creature lay Chara's corpse on a bed of flowers in the center of town they sensed that some monstrous rite was about to be enacted. With the courage of despair they assailed the demon with what weapons they had, pikes and billhooks and arrows, but to no avail. The beast did not fall, did not even stagger, but smiled its hellish smile, seized the body of the dead boy and flew off the way it came.

From that day on the village of St. Florian was cursed. Its happiness was poisoned and its peace was destroyed. Discontent and even madness spread among the inhabitants, and men and women squabbled and fought and slew each other over trifles. The end came scarcely a year later when a crazed villager, awaking in the middle of the night and screaming of his children, set his house ablaze with an overturned oil lamp. St. Florian died in flames that night, and the surviving villagers fled the valley and the hateful mountain from which their doom had come.

Henry listened to his grandmother's recitation in silence. When she was done, he chose his words carefully. "It's quite a story," he said, "but it can't possibly be literally true. I mean, a goat-headed flying thing? And Rachel was only a child."

"She did not just tell me a story," said his grandmother. "Rachel gave me this." She went to a drawer and took from it a small photo frame, handing it to Henry. It held not a photo but a scrap of yellowed, ancient-looking paper on which was drawn in smudged black ink a curious figure, vaguely human-like in outline, but its horned head was that of a snarling beast's, with a long snout and cruel fangs and a vicious smile. On the figure's chest was drawn a shape like an inverted triangle, holding three smaller triangles and above them a circle with stylized wings.

"What's this?" asked Henry.

"When the creature came," replied his grandmother, "Rachel's father grabbed quill and ink and tried to draw it. His sketch was hasty and crude, but…" She shuddered. "When St. Florian burned, Rachel escaped with her mother and with this. The man who drew it, though...he did not leave the village alive."

But Henry handed the photo frame back. "I'm sorry, gran," he said, "but to me it's just a drawing. And even if there was some truth behind this, that was a long, long time ago!"

"Why do you think no one goes to Mt. Ebott, Hank?" his grandmother hissed. "Why does no one live anywhere near there? Every once in a while some fools try it, thinking they can go to the mountain for hiking or hunting or prospecting for gold. And they always come back, swearing they'll never return. If they come back at all. Please, Hank…" She grasped Henry's hands. "You're the only family left to me...please don't go to Mt. Ebott. I don't want to lose you to the same curse that robbed my grandmother of her father."

"You won't. There's no curse. You'll see." He rose from the table and gave his grandmother an awkward hug. "I'll be fine, gran."

The old woman said nothing. She sat gazing at her great-grandfather's sketch as Henry cleared the table and washed up after dinner, and she was still gazing at it when he said good night and retired to his room.

* * *

Henry dreamed of no monsters that night, that he could remember. But early in the morning Henry dreamed that he saw his grandmother still sitting at her kitchen table, still staring at the drawing, and he thought he heard her say something, but the voice was not hers. It was deep and resonant but feminine, blurred with weeping, fraught with more grief than Henry had ever before heard in a voice:

"My children!...my children!"

He started awake. A tear had run down his cheek. Angrily he wiped it away.


	2. Chapter 2

Part 2

Henry Darzens began his construction job on the Mountain Haven Ski Resort that spring, leaving his grandmother's house to take up residence in Ebottsville. The new town wasn't yet much more than a cluster of Quonset huts in a valley under the shadow of Mount Ebott, temporary housing for the crews of laborers working on the resort, and Henry missed the quiet and the privacy he enjoyed when living with his grandmother. But he was an adaptable sort, and Upland Tungsten was promising new housing soon for the workers; Henry was content to hold out till then.

Before he moved out, his grandmother had said no more about the mountain and its "curse" until the very last day. A distance had opened between them after that awkward night, and she had become less free with her conversation and her story-telling. On his last day in her house, though, she had hugged her grandson tightly. "Please be careful, Hank," she had said. "And please take this." She then had handed him the small photo frame containing his ancestor's sketch of the goat-headed creature.

"Gran...why do you want me to have this?"

"If you _are_ going to try to live and work on that mountain, Hank, I want you to remember Rachel and her mother and father, and what happened to them. Never forget who _also_ lives there, Hank. I pray that you never find out for yourself."

Not knowing how to respond to this fearful display of superstition, Henry had merely accepted his grandmother's gift with polite thanks. He wrapped the frame carefully in newsprint and stashed the parcel in his rucksack.

His grandmother died less than three months later, leaving Henry her house and a small inheritance. Only Henry and a distant cousin attended her funeral. Her death left an empty space in his heart, but as he watched her coffin being lowered into the earth he did not weep.

* * *

Within a week of moving to Ebottsville Henry Darzens began dreaming of monsters again.

They were innocuous and infrequent enough, at first, like most of the oddly memorable monster-dreams Henry had seen as a young boy. Once he dreamed of two canine creatures, wearing identical hooded robes and carrying identical battle-axes, nuzzling each other in a snowy forest. Another night he saw a Christmas tree topped with a star and surrounded by laughing and cheering monster children of all descriptions. Yet another night he watched a short, squat monster like a miniature orange dinosaur, wearing a white lab coat and round glasses, shouting "It's working!" in excitement as she tended the controls of a strange machine shaped curiously like the skull of an enormous deer. Henry didn't think much of the return of these odd dreams; they were extraordinarily vivid, and the emotions he felt when he experienced them were at times uncomfortably intense, but they were pleasant emotions mostly and didn't interfere too badly with his sleep.

A few days after he returned to work from the death of his grandmother, however, his dreams began to change.

* * *

 _An ordinary-looking sitting-room in a small house, furnished with a dining table and a bookshelf and an easy chair set near a glowing fireplace, but in the chair was a white-furred creature whose head resembled a goat's, bearing large floppy ears and small horns and a pair of spectacles perched on its muzzle. The creature was clad in a purple robe and on the front was an_ _escutcheon shaped like an inverted triangle, containing three smaller triangles and above them a circle with stylized wings._ _The creature was serenely perusing a book, but then it interrupted its reading, bowed its head and sighed. The mournfulness of the sigh was like a stab in the heart—_

He jerked upright as consciousness returned. What had just happened? Was that the goat-headed monster from his grandmother's wild tale and her great-grandfather's sketch? It had the same goatlike face, the same strange device on its chest...no, the monster in his dream was different. The horns were smaller, the face less cruel...maybe the drawing was wrong?

Not until the sky was already grey with approaching dawn did Henry succeed in getting any more sleep.

* * *

 _A monster whose outline he could barely distinguish, standing in a vast dark cave illuminated only by points of light far above that looked like stars, though somehow he knew they weren't. Scattered around the monster were pale blue flowers, faintly luminous. The monster leaned over one of these flowers and asked it, "I wish my sister and I will see the real stars someday..." An intolerable sense of loss struck him like wave—_

Henry breathed hard, trying to compose himself. This was the third time in two weeks one of these dreams had put an abrupt end to the night's rest he desperately needed. He lay awake until sunrise.

* * *

 _A shaft of light from high above, shining down on a bed of bright yellow flowers growing over a low mound of earth. In the center of the patch of flowers grew one that was somewhat larger and taller than the others. As he watched, the larger flower slowly swiveled its head about until it faced him directly. The flower bore a face, a face that convulsed into a terrifying rictus of a smile—_

Henry was too embarrassed to explain to his coworkers with whom shared the Quonset hut why he had yelled in his sleep. Luckily he now had a bottle of Librium to help him. He swallowed one and in an hour he was asleep again, but he was almost late to work the next morning.

* * *

Construction of the Mountain View resort continued apace, still on schedule for a December opening, but the optimism and camaraderie that had ruled over the worksite in the spring was, by midsummer, fast disintegrating. Every week, more and more workers were quitting their jobs, often without notice. Upland was able to replace them steadily enough with fresh laborers from Highlands but the rapid turnover helped to fray the nerves of an already overstressed workforce. Irritation and anger flared up daily and occasionally fights would break out among coworkers.

The promised new housing in Ebottsville had not materialized. Upland Tungsten had brought in a contractor in the spring to do the job but after a few months, having constructed only a handful of homes and a small store, they inexplicably reneged on the contract and walked. No new contractor took their place. The few houses that had been built went to the supervisors and foremen on site, and the regular workers like Henry went on living in their temporary barracks.

He was not alone in his sleeplessness. More and more often, when he would wake at two or three in the morning with his emotions roiling from yet another nightmare, Henry would see that others in his quarters were awake in their beds as well, or out of their beds altogether for a pace or a smoke. Occasionally he'd ask one of his fellows why he was up so early and he'd invariably get some variation on the answer, "It's nothing, just couldn't sleep, that's all." Some workers resorted to alcohol to treat their insomnia; others, like Henry, turned to the gentler intoxication of prescription hypnotics.

One night after waking from a nightmare Henry threw on his coat and went outside for a breath of the night air. The sky was clear and the cold light of a nearly full Moon shone over the town. To the northwest the black silhouette of Mt. Ebott blocked out the stars. Henry shivered at the sight. Suddenly the door behind him opened and one of his fellow workers emerged, fully dressed, with a rucksack slung over one shoulder. His name was Riley and Henry didn't particularly care for him; Riley had a belligerent streak that the strain of the past few months had only worsened, and he was starting to threaten and pick fights with other laborers. Riley pushed past Henry without seeming to notice him and began to stride up the road, towards the site of the lodge and towards the mountain.

"Hey, Riley, wait!" Henry called out. "Hey!" At the second call the man stopped and slowly turned to look at Henry.

"I need to go," said Riley quietly. "I need to find the way in."

"Into what? I don't understand."

"In there." Riley pointed in the direction of Mt. Ebott. "He wants me."

" _Who_ wants you? Riley? Riley!"

It was no use. Riley had already turned away and within a few minutes he had disappeared from Henry's sight.

Riley did not report to work the next day, or any subsequent day.

* * *

 _It was the bed of yellow flowers again. Lying amid them in the shaft of light was the twisted body of a man, one leg bent unnaturally backward, blood flowing from his mouth and his nostrils. The man was Riley, and he was dead._

 _The creature whom he had seen reading, the goatlike creature with purple robes, approached the fallen body, and Henry could see its soft brown eyes were wide with shock. It bent down over Riley, checking his pulse and his breathing, finding neither. The eyes filled with tears. It scooped up the dead Riley in its strong arms, cradled the body against her chest and wept aloud—_

Henry threw the covers off to the floor in his haste to get out of bed. He had started to take a Librium every night just before attempting sleep, and for a time this seemed to work; he slept more and the dreams were fewer. But the effect was fading and his dreams were coming back, as bad as ever.

* * *

The thirtieth of November dawned bright, the sky blue between scattered clouds, and the Sun glared off yesterday's snowfall. Henry Darzens stood on the slope of Mt. Ebott, looking up a pristine ski run toward the group of newly constructed, faux-Bavarian styled buildings that comprised the Mountain Haven Ski Resort. It had taken the hiring of far more workers than originally planned and draconian punishments for absenteeism, but they had done it. Henry felt a little sorry that he had zero interest in skiing.

The resort was due to open to the public in two days. Upland Tungsten had offered to all the workers who had helped build the resort substantial discounts to stay a night or two in the lodge and to use the skiing facilities, as well as jobs working for the resort in customer service and housekeeping and so forth. The bulk of the workforce refused these invitations to luxury and employment, fleeing from Mt. Ebott the moment their labor was no longer required. Henry and a couple dozen other of the crew had stayed, however, lured by the prospect of softer work after months of back-breaking labor. When the resort opened Henry would be there, working on the maintenance staff.

Henry had thought about leaving, of course. The last several months had been rough on him and he'd had to switch from Librium to temazepam to get any sleep, but surely with the pressure off and the hard work over, his mood and his dreams would improve.

* * *

 _He was in a long, dimly lit passageway. At its end was a massive stone door, surrounded by brickwork, and carved into the stone were the familiar shapes of the three triangles and the circle with wings. The goatlike monster leaned heavily against the door, raising its voice to speak to someone on the other side, a deep, resonant, yet feminine voice that he'd heard before, a voice blurred with tears._

" _If a human ever comes through this door...could you please, please promise something? Watch over them and protect them, will you not?"_

 _There came a muffled answer that he could not make out, but it seemed to satisfy the monster. "Thank you," she said. Then she slumped down against the door, leaning her back against it, crying softly. After a few minutes, she spoke as if to herself._

" _Please protect them, whoever you are, because I cannot. Every time I try, I have failed. Every time, whatever I do, whatever I say, the humans leave me...and every time, I can feel them die."_

 _She raised her head, the tear-filled eyes wide and staring, burning with fear and grief and anger all at once. The blazing eyes looked directly at him. "Why must you abandon me again and again? Why won't you let me save you?_ _ **Why must you always leave?**_ _"_

Henry Darzens flailed about in the darkness, knocking over the bedside lamp and the alarm clock, before he remembered where he was. _It's just a dream,_ he told himself over and over. _It doesn't mean anything. It's just a dream._ He cursed and slapped himself, more than once, until he was calm.


	3. Chapter 3

Part 3

Nevertheless, as Henry Darzens spent his first winter at the Mountain Haven Ski Resort, his life settled down into a kind of routine. He would spend his days on replacing air filters and unclogging sinks and repairing light fixtures, then at night he'd retire to the small apartment the resort had provided him, swallow a temazepam and get as much sleep as his dreams permitted. For his nightmares did continue, yet the dulling touch of familiarity helped to make them more endurable. He came almost to welcome the reappearance in his dreams of familiar locations and faces.

It was the sad-eyed goat woman robed in purple whom Henry saw most often. Maybe once a week he would dream of her, in brief but vivid tableaux, pervaded with a sorrow more felt than seen—quietly reading in her sitting-room, or preoccupying herself in the kitchen, or paying a contemplative visit to the patch of yellow flowers on their earthen mound. Sometimes, on worse than usual nights, Henry would again be forced to witness her crying and grieving for her lost children, or raging in the darkness against her abandonment. Even these wrenching nightmares, however, grew by degrees a little easier to tolerate.

Every now and then, however, Henry would get blindsided.

* * *

 _The orange dinosaur monster in her white lab coat stumbled backward, tripping over a chair behind her and sprawling to the ground. Her spectacles tumbled from her muzzle and cracked in pieces on the floor. "No!" she screamed. "No, no, no, no!" Advancing toward her was a white, slithering mountain of dripping ooze, forming and reforming multiple legs and dribbling froth from a gaping black hole where a face should have been. The creature's ghastly parody of a head leaned over her—_

* * *

 _A skinny blue monster, with fierce yellow eyes and fins like a fish's growing from her head and flame-red hair, clenched her fists and faced down three other monsters that towered over her. "I'll take you all on!" the girl hollered in a shrill, childish voice that provoked her attackers into laughter. She flew at the monster closest to her, a hulking brute like a brown bear, surprising him and knocking him down. Baring sharklike teeth she sank them into the bear's shoulder, and he roared in pain. The other two monsters tackled the girl and pinioned her by her arms, forcing her upright. In blind rage the bear snatched up a discarded bottle from the ground and smashed it with all his force into the girl's face. Glass shattered, dark blood spurted, the girl screamed in agony—_

* * *

 _Noises of splashing and rushing water echoed through dark, cavernous sewers. He saw mounds of garbage heaped everywhere and smelled the nauseating odors of mildew and decay heavy in the air. The little dinosaur monster stood amid the piles of garbage at the edge of a precipice, staring at a stream of trash-strewn water as it flowed over the threshold and cascaded into the black abyss that yawned at the monster's feet. In her arms was a stack of notebooks. One by one, she tossed them into the cataract, watching each disappear into the unguessable depths. When the last notebook disappeared, the monster leaned forward, gazing into the chasm for many moments, then she whimpered, closed her eyes, and lifted one foot, hesitating—_

When Henry awoke from that one he found that he'd somehow gotten out of bed in his sleep and opened his second-story window. Afterward he installed a locking pin on the sash.

* * *

At least his job at Mountain Haven kept him busy for a while. After the initial burst of attendance following the grand opening, the flow of tourists and vacationers into and out of the resort declined to somewhat disappointing levels; even on the busiest winter days it was rare for the lodge to be even half full. It was enough, though, to keep Henry occupied with a steady stream of maintenance busywork and repairing damage to the rooms—indeed, rather more damage to the rooms than Henry was expecting, especially as the ski season approached its end. Henry had never worked in a hotel or anything of the sort before so he had no idea how usual it was for guests to overturn furniture or smash lights or break windows, but as the winter passed into spring the Mountain Haven lodge was experiencing such events several times a month.

May brought the end of the ski season and Mountain Haven geared up for summer, advertising heavily its range of outdoor activities: hiking, mountain biking, summer camping, rafting, fly fishing. (The resort wanted to offer horseback riding as well and set up a small stable, from which all the horses promptly bolted _en masse_ a week later, putting an end to the project.) Again there was a transient flood of attendees and again the traffic died down, but this time the attendance figures slid further downhill. On the Fourth of July weekend the lodge managed to sell out scarcely more than a quarter of its rooms. Meanwhile the staff was bleeding workers; every month the resort struggled to fill unexpected vacancies.

Near the end of August the head of the maintenance department, a bumptious, balding, but not unlikable fellow named Collins, pulled Henry aside during his lunch break. "Can I talk to you for a sec?" he asked. Henry nodded and followed Collins into his office, heart sinking. Collins noticed Henry's dejection.

"Guess you know what this is about. You're a good man, Hank, and you've been here longer than almost anybody, so I want to tell you first. We're going to have to cut down pretty drastically on the staff soon."

Henry nodded. It wasn't exactly a surprise. "What the hell is going on? Mr. Collins, do you know? Why is this place tanking?"

Collins shrugged helplessly. "It's not really my department, but what I've been told is...our word of mouth is just awful. Hardly anyone who's been here any length of time ever comes back and they're not shy about telling their friends to stay away. The marketing boys have been looking into it and they say that people aren't complaining about the facilities or the way the resort looks or anything obvious like that. They just...kinda hate the place."

"Weird. You think people would say why."

"Well…" Collins shifted about in his chair uncertainly. "There's one thing that's come up once or twice, and, well…" He chuckled apologetically. "Hank, do you get nightmares?"

Henry's eyes widened in surprise. "Uh...doesn't everybody?"

"I mean, a _lot_ of nightmares. More than usual."

Henry kept his voice light. "Oh, I dunno, maybe. I've just chalked it up to stress."

Collins looked dissatisfied. "Huh. Well, Hank, I'll tell you this much: normally I don't have any dreams I can remember at all, but since I started working here I've had a few. Strange ones. Like one time, there was this talking flower—" He stopped himself, embarrassed. "Well, never mind that. The point is, a few of the customers who've given us terrible ratings said the place _literally_ gave them nightmares. Weird, huh?"

Henry kept his bewilderment to himself. "Yeah, Mr. Collins, it's weird enough, but...I dunno, it's just dreams, right? It's not like we can do anything about what the guests dream about."

"True that." Collins sighed. "Well, Hank, I'd better let you go have the rest of your break. You'll keep this quiet for now, huh? Marketing is trying hard to drum up business for Labor Day weekend. If that comes and goes and we're no better off...then it'll be time to spread the bad news."

Henry thanked him and went back to finish lunch.

He dreamed about the talking flower again that night.

* * *

Attendance on Labor Day weekend did not exceed even a third of the resort's total capacity. At the end of the week afterward Mountain Haven laid off three quarters of its staff. Henry was not one of them, but he was now expected to work housekeeping and as a porter as well as carrying on with maintenance.

The resort limped along through autumn and into winter and its second ski season. Henry Darzens limped along with it, forcing himself through a fog of sleeplessness and temazepam hangover every day to do his rounds. He'd upped his dosage from fifteen to thirty milligrams, which did reduce the frequency of his nightmares, but now it was harder to get up in the mornings than ever.

As Henry stared out the window one January afternoon, watching the occasional skier zipping down the slope or wiping out into a snowbank, Henry wondered not for the first time why he didn't just quit. It's not as though he hadn't walked out before on jobs that had lost their savor. And almost everyone else he had ever known since coming to Mt. Ebott almost two years before was long gone. He had little to return to, it was true. His grandmother was dead. He'd sold her house back when he thought he'd be purchasing a home in Ebottsville, the one that had never been built. He had no family waiting for him, no spouse or lover. But at least if he went back to Highlands he'd be away from the hateful mountain. What was keeping him here?

 _ **Why must you always leave?**_

Resolve hardened within Henry. He wasn't cutting and running, not like the others, not this time. He would see this through.

* * *

 _He was looking at the bed of yellow flowers again. No...it was not the same bed of flowers. There was a low mound of earth in front of him and flowers grew there but they were white and pink and violet, not yellow; there were other planting beds all around it. He saw that he was not in a dim place illuminated only by a single shaft of light but in a bright conservatory. Stained glass windows bore the device he had come to know so well: a cluster of three triangles and, above them, a circle aloft on stylized wings._

 _Out of a dark doorway emerged a monster of frightful aspect, a horned and fanged beast with the head of a goat, clad in purple robes, smiling its diabolical smile and bearing in its arms the dead body of a young child, a child with long dark hair and wearing a yellow and green striped sweater. Henry would have run from the monster but his dream froze him in place. As the creature came towards him, though, he could see that its robes and its fur were rent and lacerated in multiple places and matted with blood. The monster's steps were uncertain, unsteady, and suddenly Henry felt in his bones the effort the monster must have been exerting to keep itself upright and walking._

 _The monster reached the center of the conservatory and gently laid the body of the child on the earth. Henry looked down at the dead child. Whether the child was a boy or a girl, he could not tell. Their eyes were closed, their face was pale, and their hands were clasped together around a bouquet of brilliant yellow flowers. Henry looked up again at the monster, but the creature who had entered the conservatory was no longer there: instead there stood a diminutive, white-furred, floppy-eared child, its face like a youthful copy of the face of the sad-eyed goat woman he had seen in so many of his dreams. The child's body was horribly battered and bloodied, but the long face was still smiling and its eyes shone as they looked directly at Henry. "I'm sorry," said the monster in a small, sad voice. Then the monster turned ashen-grey and within seconds crumbled into powder. The cloud of dust rolled over him, choking him, choking him—_

Henry woke in a fit of violent coughing, the smell of burning in his nostrils. Acrid smoke was seeping into his apartment through the front door. An alarm blared in the hallway outside and he heard shouting and running feet. Henry ran to his window and tried to force it open, only to be hindered by the locking pin he had installed. He cursed, tore the chain of the locking pin away from the wood by main force, slammed the window open and lowered himself out, hanging onto the windowsill then letting himself drop into the snow.

He sprinted away from the lodge, not stopping until he was a hundred yards away. Fire had almost consumed the entire first floor and was eating its way into the floors above. Clouds of black smoke billowed up into the starry sky. He looked around wildly, trying to guess how many people had escaped. He spotted a familiar face among those milling about and ran towards it.

"Mr. Collins! What the fuck's happening? Is anyone left inside?"

"Hank!" Collins's relief was palpable. "You're safe! We're pretty sure almost everyone got out. Stevens is going around now getting a head count."

"Wait. _Almost_ everyone?"

"Yeah." Collins was grave now. "The guy who started the fire. I don't know what happened exactly but it seems like one of the guests on the first floor set fire to his own room. A couple of the other guests said he was screaming like a madman before the fire broke out...something about a kid with red eyes, I dunno."

Henry shivered. The night was clear, very cold, and he was wearing nothing but sweatpants and a white T-shirt. "Where's the damn fire department?"

"Shit, Hank, on a snowy night like this, and a fire halfway up a mountain? They're gonna take forever to get here." They both turned to watch the lodge burn. "The resort is toast, Hank. There's no way Upland's gonna keep wasting money on us after this. It's over."


	4. Chapter 4

Part 4

The end became official a month later. The Mountain Haven resort closed to the public after the fire, under the pretense that the lodge would be rebuilt in time for the next ski season, but Henry and everyone else knew it was a lie. At the end of February, Collins summoned Henry to another informal meeting in his office.

The manager's mood was in equal measure downcast and relieved. "Can't imagine this comes as a shock, Hank, but Upland Tungsten is pulling the plug. They've been trying to rustle up a buyer for the resort or what's left of it but it's no good. We're poison. Nobody wants to get within a mile of this place."

Henry slumped in his chair. "That's crummy. What are you going to do?"

"Me? Get the hell away from here, that's what I'm gonna do. Not gonna lie, Hank. I hate this fucking mountain. I'm starting to believe all the stories about it, and I never want to see it again. Don't tell me you don't feel the same way."

Henry got up and paced over to the window of Collins's office. Outside he could see the snow-covered slopes of Mount Ebott rising up and out of sight into the lowering clouds. Did he feel the same way? Did he long to flee?

 _ **Why must you always leave?**_

"You'll probably think I'm nuts, Mr. Collins," Henry replied slowly, "but I don't. This place has kind of been my home for two years now. I'd stay, if I could."

Collins barked out a derisive laugh. "Good luck with that! There's not gonna be a resort for much longer. There's probably not even gonna be an Ebottsville once they dismantle and haul away all that temporary housing."

"What about the homes that did get built? And the corner store?"

"Shit, I dunno. Probably put 'em on the market for a song and not get any takers. Like anyone is gonna hand over money to live in Uncanny Valley, much less run a store there that'll get three customers a day, maybe. Can you imagine anyone being that dumb?"

* * *

Henry Darzens adjusted his rucksack on his shoulder, turned the key in the front door of the Mountain Haven Filling Station and stepped inside, snapping on the overhead lights. Dust covered all the empty shelving and cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. The station had been closed and evacuated with the shutdown of the ski resort, and the gasoline contract cancelled; all of the pumps out front now had plastic bags taped over their nozzles and "OUT OF ORDER" signs pasted over the counters.

Collins had been right; the service station and the small cluster of houses around it had been put up at bargain-basement prices, but nobody was in any hurry to buy. Henry double-checked his bank balances, waited a few months, offered to purchase the station at eighty percent of its asking price—and it was his. It wasn't quite how he'd originally planned to invest his grandmother's legacy, but at least he had a home now. In the meantime he'd been living quietly if illegally in one of the few single-family houses that existed in Ebottsville. It too was on the market but Henry had felt pretty safe in guessing he'd be able to get away with some short-term squatting.

Henry toured his purchase, looking in all the rooms, feeling a twinge of buyer's remorse. The place was so empty, so derelict. He'd let himself in for a lot of work, that was for certain, and his modest inheritance would be taking more hits. And what did he know about running a store?

He finished his tour at the convenience store's front desk, barren except for a folding chair leaning up against it. Opening the chair he collapsed into it, pulling a sheaf of paperwork from his rucksack. Fumbling around the bottom of the bag for a ballpoint he felt a small parcel, wrapped in newsprint. He withdrew and unwrapped it. It was the photo frame containing the pen-and-ink sketch of the monster that had supposedly been seen and drawn by his distant ancestor in the vanished town of St. Florian.

He studied the picture for a few minutes. When his grandmother had first shown Henry the sketch he had seen nothing in the creature's grinning expression but cruelty. Now, though, he could only think of the gentle smile on the face of the goat-faced child in his dream, the dying child who had dissolved before his eyes into a cloud of ash. He shuddered at the memory. What had really happened all those decades ago in St. Florian, here in the valley where he now lived? Had there really ever been a monster?

Henry set up the photo frame underneath the counter where only he would be able to see it, then turned his attention back to his paperwork.

* * *

Henry Darzens's life settled once again into a routine. He cleaned up and reopened the convenience store, kept it modestly stocked, and spent most of his days behind his counter, reading books, flipping through magazines, solving crosswords and Junior Jumbles from the newspapers. A few times a day a customer would come through, always someone who was taking the scenic route around Mt. Ebott and usually hoping (in vain) that they'd found some place to fill up their tank. There was the occasional curiosity-seeker or urban explorer wanting to prowl around the deserted site of the ski resort. Once there was even a reporter from Highlands who wanted to do a retrospective piece on the rise and fall of the ski resort and the arson that ended its life, but Henry sent him on his way, never bothering to tell the reporter that he'd seen it for himself.

He even had neighbors, of a sort. The houses in Ebottsville eventually found buyers, men and women who wanted or needed a bargain on a home and didn't much care where it was. He actually knew one of these people, slightly, a red-faced man named Glaser. Henry remembered him vaguely from his days of working at Mountain Haven; he had been a porter at the lodge and was one of those who lost his job in the general layoff. Glaser was not keen to chat about old times, however, being disposed—as was everyone who ended up living in Ebottsville—to avoid conversation and guard his privacy. All Glaser wanted from Henry was a steady supply of beer and wine. Henry felt a little guilty about feeding his old coworker's habit, but business was business.

And there were still the dreams to keep Henry company. They had almost become old friends, his nightmares and the monsters who inhabited them: the melancholy dinosaur scientist in her white coat and round spectacles, the one-eyed blue fish-girl who somehow grew in his dreams to be tall and muscular as the years passed, the bereaved goat mother in her purple robes. Henry would see others from time to time. Once he saw a pair of what looked like Pacman ghosts, with featureless bodies and faces that were mostly eyes, hovering together near a pair of curiously bulbous and lopsided houses, grey and pink; one ghost parted from the other, smiling broadly as it floated away, but the other looked like they'd just had their heart broken and rained endless tears onto the ground. Another time Henry saw a domed house shaped and painted to look like an angry sea monster; in front of it stood the fish-woman, standing next to what looked like a tall skeleton dressed in red. She said something to the skeleton that prompted it to run off, bawling its eyes out, while the fish-woman looked on distraught. But for the most part Henry's dreams, like his life, fell into a tolerable and familiar routine.

Years passed in this way, then decades. The '70s and '80s and '90s passed and a new millennium came but Henry Darzens scarcely noticed, never varying his daily grind, growing grey in the service of his inexplicable bond with the mountain and the valley in which his great-great-grandmother had once lived. Occasionally, in the early years of his life in the shadow of Mt. Ebott, after a particularly bad week of business or a worse than usual night's sleep perhaps, he'd think about packing up and moving elsewhere. But as the years went on the impulses faded and went away.

Ebottsville was his home. Business or no business, nightmares or no nightmares, he would never leave it.

One night in 201x, however, the nightmares changed.

* * *

 _The goat-woman was once again standing in the dark corridor in front of the carven stone door, but now she was not alone: she was kneeling in front of a child with long dark hair, wearing a blue and purple striped long-sleeved shirt. The child's back was to him; he could not see their face. The goat woman was speaking to the child, her melodious voice infinitely kind._

" _If you truly wish to leave the Ruins...I will not stop you. However, when you leave...please do not come back. I hope you understand."_

 _The child suddenly threw their arms around the goat woman's body, hugging her desperately. She hesitated for a moment, then cradled the child in her arms, pillowing their head on her chest and closing her eyes. After many long moments she broke the embrace and stood up._

" _Goodbye, my child."_

 _The monster watched as the child pushed open the door, disappearing into the blackness that lay on the other side. The door slammed shut of its own accord when the child was gone. The monster walked slowly toward the door and put her paws out to touch it._

" _They are the last. Asgore will kill them, he will gain his seventh and last human SOUL, and then he will destroy the world above." She began to laugh, a bleak, mirthless laugh that tore at his heart. "At least this will be my last failure. There will be no more fallen ones whom I send out to die. That agony, at least, is over."_

 _The laugh turned into sobbing. "Why must I be punished and mocked so cruelly? They were the bravest, the kindliest, the_ _ **best**_ _…" The sobbing rose into a wild scream of despair. "_ _ **Why did they have to look so much like my Chara?**_ _"_

Henry woke with a yell, tumbling out of bed and running to the closed door of the little room in the back of the shop where he slept. He leaned heavily against the door, heart racing, breath coming in gasps. He'd lost count of how many times he'd seen the goat-woman sad, crying, wailing for her loss, but this was worse than all those other dreams had been, far worse.

" _He will destroy the world above…"_ It couldn't mean anything. Dreams didn't mean anything. Henry went to his nightstand and fumbled for his tranquilizer bottle. Henry tipped a temazepam into his palm, ready to pop it into his mouth, but then he tipped the pill back into the bottle.

He spent the rest of the night reading, every light in his room on.

* * *

 _The child in the blue and purple shirt stood in an enormous cavern amid jagged pinnacles and mounds of broken stone, poised in a stance of readiness. At the summit of the tallest stone stood a soldier in heavy plate armor. A massive helmet hid the face; behind it flowed the soldier's flame-red hair. Slowly the soldier removed the helmet, revealing the face of the blue fish-woman, her single eye ablaze with yellow fire._

" _You!" she cried, her deep, growling voice booming through the cavern. "You're standing in the way of everybody's hopes and dreams! Your continued existence is a crime! Your life is all that stands between us and our freedom!"_

 _She banged her fist against her armored chest. Power flowed into her voice. "Right now...I can feel everyone's hearts pounding together! Everyone has been waiting their whole lives for this moment! But we're not nervous at all!"_

 _She flung her arm out in a gesture that took in her entire world. "When everyone puts their hearts together, they can't lose! Now! Human! Let's end this, right here! Right now!" Her arm swung round to point at the child, but her fiery gaze seemed to turn onto Henry. He quailed before it. "_ _ **I'll show you how determined monsters can be!"**_

 _Suddenly her fist was gripping a spear made of brilliant, sky-blue light. With a fearsome snarl and a mighty leap from her stone pinnacle she descended upon the child and Henry, spear aimed straight for them—_

Henry screamed this time, clutching at his chest for a wild moment until he realized that he was still in bed. He could still hear the monster's peroration thundering in his ears, hammering away at him. Why was this armored warrior flinging down such a mighty challenge to a little child who couldn't possibly stand any chance against her?

But that was not the most bewildering thing. For a fleeting moment, Henry realized with profound shock, he had wanted the fish-woman to succeed.

* * *

 _The child was looking down at a strange shape lying inert on the floor: the torso of a human, so it seemed at first, but then he suddenly perceived that the shape was made of metal. The chest plates were coated in lustrous pink enamel, and a pink heart adorned the abdomen; the shoulders were enameled black; the metal of the head gleamed pristine and silvery-white. Flowing black synthetic hair partly hid the face, which had been wrought with the skill and beauty of a Greek Antinoös; the eyes were closed. The skittering sound of clawed feet approached from behind the child and then the orange dinosaur scientist burst into the scene, gasping from unaccustomed exertion._

" _Oh my god," she said. "Mettaton!" The scientist ran to the side of the fallen metallic creature, running her paws over its body. Her voice was shaky and ragged. "Mettaton, are you…" She opened various service panels and inspected various mechanisms. Then she laughed, but the laugh was nervous and tinged with hysteria. "Thank god it's just the batteries," she said, looking into the metal being's face. "Mettaton, if you were gone...I would have...I'd have…" She began to sniffle._

 _The child laid a friendly hand on the scientist's shoulder. She flinched a little at the touch, but forced herself to look up at the child and smile. "I m-mean, h-hey, it's n-no problem, you know? He's just a robot. If you messed it up, I c-could always…j-just build another…um...w-why don't you go on ahead? I...I j-just need a moment."_

 _The child nodded and vocalized their assent, then exited the room into a long steel-blue corridor. Henry was compelled to follow. Shortly he heard the sound of the scientist's approaching feet again. "S-sorry about that. Let's keep going," she said, keeping up a flow of high-strung chatter as she followed the child. "S-so you're about to meet Asgore, h-huh? You must be, um, you must be, uh...pr-pretty excited about all that, huh? You'll f-f-finally...you'll finally get to go home! I just, uh, I just want to say goodbye, and..."_

 _The child reached an elevator at the end of the corridor. They were about to enter when the scientist abruptly shouted, "WAIT!" The child halted and turned toward her. Henry could see their face now: olive-complexioned, solemn, with dark brown eyes that reminded him oddly of the motherly goat monster's._

 _The scientist tried to meet the child's gaze, and Henry saw a brief glimpse of her bronze-colored eyes, wide open behind the round lenses, brimming over with anguish. But she could not endure the child's calm stare and dropped her head, staring at the ground. When she spoke, her voice was low, unquavering, lacking its habitual stammer. "I can't take this any more," she said. "I lied to you. I've been doing nothing but lie to you." Tears started to roll down her muzzle but she kept her voice steady. "A human SOUL isn't strong enough to cross the Barrier alone. It takes at least a human soul..._ _ **and**_ _a monster soul." She lifted her head and this time she was able to look the child in the face. "If you want to go home, you'll have to take_ _ **his**_ _soul. You'll have to kill Asgore."_

 _She turned and began to walk away. The child made a distressed sound and reached out a comforting hand, but then her walk turned into a panicked run, carrying Henry's point of view along with it._

" _I've murdered them," she was gibbering to herself. "I've been spying on them, tricking them, pretending to be their friend, I've already almost killed them a dozen times over, and now—and now—" She began to wail, her sobbing cries echoing off the walls of the corridor. "I'm garbage, I ruin everything I touch,_ _ **I should be dead—**_ _"_

Henry tore the bedclothes off of himself and flung them across the room. Out of habit he grabbed for the temazepam bottle in his nightstand but he took one angry look at the vial of pills in his hand then flung it in the trash.

Why was this happening now? For forty years his nightmares had been a chronic but manageable pain. Never very pleasant, sometimes dying down for a bit, sometimes flaring up again, but he'd been able to live with them. Why, all of a sudden, did his brain decide to start inflicting night after night of imaginary creatures' _misery_ on him?

Henry was sick of it. He was sick of sleep, he was sick of dreams, he was sick of drugging himself stupid. Very well then. He would fight sleep. He pushed his way out of his bedroom, seeking coffee.


	5. Chapter 5

Part 5

The first twenty-four hours were easily got through. Henry fixed himself some coffee and spent the hours until the opening of the store working on the New York Times crossword puzzle. A Thursday puzzle, so he'd probably never complete it, but it passed the time agreeably. Business that day was somewhat brisker than usual. No fewer than five cars passed through town, and all of their drivers stopped and bought snacks and drinks. What's more, old Glaser had decided to get the day's tippling started early, buying his first bottle of wine shortly after eight in the morning.

* * *

Benzodiazepine withdrawal worked in his favor that evening. By the time he normally went to bed Henry was jumpy, restive, and wider awake than he'd felt in years. He spent the entire night absorbed in a P. D. James novel he'd been putting off reading and not once felt the least bit drowsy or dopey.

* * *

The second day, cracks began to show. The jitters caused by withdrawal from the temazepam deepened into a pervasive, unsettling feeling of anxiety. The voices of customers jarred unpleasantly on Henry's nerves and he had to bite back ill-tempered responses to questions. When Glaser came in again for his second bottle of fortified wine that day, Henry's irritation at the man's constant drunkenness, and his irritation at himself for having supplied him for so long, bubbled to the surface.

"Hey, Mr. Glaser, can I ask you something?" said Henry while Glaser was reaching into all his pockets looking for money. "You've been drinking a _lot_ the last couple days. Don't you think you should take a break from the stuff?"

The old man stared at him with bleary, watery blue eyes. "You'd wanna get drunk too if you knew what was coming."

"...Okay...what's coming?"

"They are. From the mountain." Glaser waved an arm in the approximate direction of Mt. Ebott.

"Ah. All right." Henry regretted bringing the subject up. Finally Glaser fished a dirty ten-dollar bill from his pants and pushed it over the counter. Henry counted out his change. "You want a bag for that?"

"Don't bother." Glaser picked up his bottle and shuffled toward the exit. At the threshold he turned to address Henry. "Nothing is gonna matter in a few days. They're gonna smash the Barrier."

When he heard the last word Henry's blood turned to ice. "Ridiculous," he forced himself to say. "You're talking nonsense."

"You'll see, Mr. Darzens. You'll see." To Henry's dismay Glaser twisted off the metal cap of the bottle right in front of him and took a long pull. "It's not long now. They're going to be free."

* * *

His second night of sleeplessness went much the same as the first. Henry still felt as though he'd not be able to sleep even if he wanted to, but his thoughts were fogged and his reactions slowed. He tried reading but couldn't focus on his book for more than a few paragraphs at a time. He finally ended up getting on his ancient PC and playing solitaire and Freecell until the Sun came up.

* * *

Henry's condition deteriorated apace on his third day. His mental fog grew thicker; he drank multiple cups of coffee to attempt to clear his head but it only sharpened his anxiety while doing nothing for his alertness. There was a long stretch in the afternoon when no one at all came in, not even Glaser, and as he sat behind his counter Henry could feel himself starting to nod off.

No, that was bad. That was very bad. He forced himself up and paced around the store, stopping his restless prowling up and down the aisles only when compelled to ring up a sale.

* * *

The evening came. Henry closed the store, sat in front of his computer, cranked up the volume on "Physical Graffiti", and started playing solitaire again. He could always rely on "Kashmir" to give him a boost. "In the Light" too...but he'd forgotten about the instrumental after that...it was easy to get lost in...but it was all right, he just needed to focus on the solitaire for a few minutes until the music picked up again...just a few minutes…

" _Even when you ran away, you did it with a smile,"_ said an unfamiliar voice. Who was speaking?

" _You never gained LOVE, but you gained love. Does that make sense?"_ A sardonic tone crept into the voice. _"Maybe not."_

Henry turned around in his computer chair. Standing behind him was a diminutive figure of a skeleton, wearing a blue hoodie and a huge grin on its bony face. "Who are you?" Henry tried to ask, but he couldn't make the words come out.

The skeleton closed its eye-sockets briefly, as if taking a moment to savor Jimmy Page's guitar. Could skeletons do that with their eye-sockets? _"Now. You're about to face the greatest challenge of your entire journey. Your actions here will determine the fate of the entire world. If you refuse to fight, Asgore will take your soul and destroy humanity."_

"What do you mean, 'destroy humanity'?" Henry tried to scream. But he couldn't speak; he couldn't even move. "Bron-Yr-Aur" played on.

" _But if you kill Asgore and go home...monsters will remain trapped Underground."_ The dark eye-sockets, an eerie glow lighting them from within, bored into him. _"What will you do?"_

With a painful, tearing effort Henry wrenched his body up and out of the chair. There was no skeleton in his room. "Down by the Seaside" was starting up. Henry must have fallen asleep, or had a hallucination brought on by sleeplessness. He put a stop to "Physical Graffiti", cued up a Slayer album and went to brew himself more coffee.

* * *

The final day of Henry Darzens's struggle to escape from his dreams passed by in a confused blur. No customers came in that day except for Glaser, who wordlessly purchased a double-sized bottle of wine in mid-morning and then left. Henry continued playing loud music, heedless of the opinions of customers who weren't showing up anyway, choked down Red Bulls, and tried to stay on his feet.

It wasn't working. Nothing was working. Henry's body was mutinying against his mind's orders. He was blacking out at intervals, a few seconds here and there. During one of these blackouts he staggered into a shelf, stumbled and fell. The pain of his collision with the ground and the noise of tin cans tumbling to the floor snapped him back into relative awareness.

He had to get up. If he didn't, he'd pass out right there on the floor. But his uncoordinated muscles were betraying him and after a short effort at raising himself he sprawled back down.

 _My child...why are you doing this to yourself?_ asked a voice, deep, resonant, yet feminine.

Henry recognized the voice, but he looked round him in vain for any source. He chuckled bitterly. "You're not here," he told the voice. "You don't exist. My brain invented you."

 _No matter,_ replied the voice, with gentle amusement. _The question is still a valid one._

"Why do you think? The nightmares, one after the other. They're driving me mad."

 _Do you believe that right now, after more than three days without sleep, you are entirely sane?_

"Hah! Good one. But at least I'm not getting hit over and over again with pain and anguish." He clutched at his head. "And it's not even real! It's monsters in dreams! But every time, I can _feel_ it, like I was the one who'd lost their children or wanted to kill themselves."

The voice grew somber. _Our pain is quite real,_ it said.

Henry bit his lip. "What if it is? I didn't cause it, did I? Why am I getting tortured with it?"

 _I do not know. You must be...perceptive, in a way that most humans are not. I am sorry that you have suffered, my child. But you must stay determined. Soon our sorrow will be over, and yours with it._

With a frantic scramble that knocked more cans off the shelf Henry got to his feet. "Because you really are coming to wipe us all out, huh? Is that it?"

The voice did not answer. It had disappeared as completely as the talking skeleton had. Henry swore, and started picking up and reshelving all the fallen cans.

* * *

Somehow, Henry made it through to another evening. He locked the front door and looked out of the store windows at the Sun as it sank gradually out of sight behind the foothills of Mt. Ebott, then he tottered to his counter and sank into the chair. He spied the framed drawing of the monster of St. Florian, and picked it up to study it.

The drawing of the monster grew larger as he stared at it and it began to shift, the lines of ink seeming to lift from the paper. An unseen pen gave the monster vast wings, which it flung outwards like a hawk ready to swoop down on its prey; the monster's smile gave way to a bestial snarl as it stretched it arms out and faced Henry.

 _I'm doing this because I care about you, Chara!_ the monster howled. _I care about you more than anybody else...I'm not ready for this to end! I'm not ready for you to leave! I'm not ready to say goodbye to someone like you again…_ The beast was screaming now, weeping like a lost child as it screamed. _So please...STOP DOING THIS AND JUST LET ME WIN!"_ The beast flung its arms straight at Henry. A ball of multicolored fire shot towards him—

The photo frame fell from Henry's nerveless fingers to the counter with a loud clatter. The drawing it held looked the same as it ever did. With a start Henry realized that he still heard screaming, but it was coming from outside.

"MR. DARZENS!" hollered a voice from outside the store, Glaser's voice. "Mr. Darzens, wake up! It's time to run!" The man pounded on the glass.

Henry ran to unlock the front door. "What the fuck, Glaser? Don't slam your fists on my door, would you please? Now what's going on?"

"They're _coming,_ Mr. Darzens!" Glaser gestured at Mt. Ebott. Behind him Henry could see and hear cars peeling out of driveways and roaring off down Mountain Haven Road, away from the mountain: the few remaining inhabitants of Ebottsville were heeding Glaser's alarm and fleeing the town. "The monsters are gonna be here any minute! Grab your shit and get out of here!"

Henry looked up the road toward the mountain. Nothing unusual greeted his eye. "You're drunk, Mr. Glaser," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Your funeral, Darzens," Glaser retorted, starting to head back to the Crown Victoria he'd left idling out front. "I'm not sticking around to find out what happens to you."

"For God's sake, Glaser, you're wasted, don't get behind the...wheel…" Glaser was already in his car before Henry could finish his sentence. He watched as the Crown Vic thundered off. Then he stepped out into the middle of the road to survey the now empty town, fading into shadows as the twilight dimmed slowly into night.

He saw nothing, heard nothing. He went back into his shop, wedged the door open, turned on all the lights, and went to his desk to wait.


	6. Chapter 6

Part 6

 _It was the familiar bed of brilliant yellow flowers again, on its earthen mound illumined from high above by a shaft of light. A small figure sat there among the flowers, alone: the white-furred, floppy-eared, goat-faced child who had once died and crumbled into dust before his eyes. The child was sniffling a little and wiping their eyes on the sleeves of their yellow and green shirt. After several moments the child looked up at him and addressed him in a gentle, piping voice._

" _Don't you have anything better to do?"_

Henry woke with a start. He'd dozed off in his chair with his head slumped forward onto the counter, leaving there a small puddle of drool. Henry winced as he shifted his aching back. His body felt shaky and sick, as if he were coming down with a fever, and lifting his head from the counter sent a stab of pain through his head.

Henry looked towards his room in the back of the store with a touch of longing. Since he seemed to be doomed to pass out and dream about crying monsters no matter what he tried, he might as well do it in a comfortable bed.

A soft rapping interrupted his thoughts. Someone was knocking on the glass of the open front door. "Pardon me, human," asked a voice, deep, resonant, and feminine. "Forgive us for interrupting your sleep, but may we speak with you?"

Henry jumped up from his chair, sending it crashing backwards to the floor, and whipped round to face the source of the voice. Surely this was another hallucination. Standing in the entrance of his shop was the diminutive figure of a child in a blue and purple shirt, whose calm brown eyes regarded him from an olive-complexioned face framed by long, dark-brown hair. They were grasping the paw of a figure that Henry had come to know better than he knew anyone in his waking life, a tall, goatlike woman in purple robes adorned with a cluster of three triangles and, above them, a circle with stylized wings.

"Oh, dear," she said. "Have we startled you?"

"Um...uh. You could say that. But...come in, come in." If she was a hallucination, she was a substantial and very polite one.

The goat-woman and the child approached Henry's counter, warmth in her smile and her eyes. "Greetings, human. I am Toriel, and this is my child, Frisk. Please do not be frightened."

"I'm not scared." Henry drew a deep breath and faced his visitors squarely. "I know you. I knew you would come some day. I guess...maybe I've been waiting for you."

The monster's eyes filled with wonder and puzzlement. "But how could you know me, human? I have not seen the Sun or the Surface in hundreds of years."

"I've seen you. Not a week's gone by in more than four decades but what I haven't seen you a nightmare. Are you here for revenge? I guess I can't blame you."

Toriel stared at Henry, stunned. The child at her side gasped, emphatically shook their head in denial, and put up their hands in a "stop" gesture.

"Please, I assure you, human," Toriel stammered out, "revenge is the last thing I wish. Why do you think I seek revenge?"

"For _that._ " Henry seized up his ancestor's drawing in its frame and held it up for Toriel to see. "For the monster that supposedly came here two centuries ago and attacked the village of St. Florian."

Toriel gave a little cry and took up the drawing in her paws. "Where—where did you get this?"

"A great-great-great-grandfather of mine who lived in the village is supposed to have drawn it from life. It's...it's your kid, isn't it?"

Toriel bowed her head and nodded. Tears fell from her eyes. Frisk threw their arms around Toriel's body as far as they could reach, buried their face in her robes, and uttered a sound that, muffled and rusty-sounding as it was, was unmistakably the single word "mom".

"Yes," whispered Toriel. "That is my son, Asriel. He came to St. Florian to fulfill the dying wish of their sibling, Chara, and lay their body to rest among the flowers they loved."

Henry's fatigued mind reeled. "But...Chara was the boy that ran away from the village...the boy they thought the monster had murdered…"

"Chara was not a boy, but otherwise you are correct. They had fled their village and never wished to see its people again. An accident brought them into our kingdom. Asriel found them and befriended them, and my husband and I accepted them as a second child. When, a few years later, Chara sickened and died, wanting only to see the flowers that grew in St. Florian once more, Asriel was...distraught. In his grief he fused with their dying sibling's soul, flew through the Barrier that separated us from the Surface, and carried Chara's body back to their village…" Her weeping brought an end to her account. She knelt down, clutching Frisk tightly to her. "My children…" she said to them. "My children." Frisk tried to comfort their distressed mother, with soothing sounds and affectionate pats.

Henry felt tears starting into his own eyes but impatiently he dashed them away. Now wasn't the time for that, not when he was preparing to meet his own end. "I'm sorry that a bunch of frightened humans killed your son. We're murderous shits, that's what we do best, isn't it? So if you've come here to pay us all back for that...you can start with me." He drew himself up. "I've lived too long as it is. I'm not afraid to die. Maybe I even deserve it. I came here to help desecrate your mountain for a flippin' ski resort, didn't I? Isn't that why you've been torturing me from that day on with nightmares? _Forcing_ me to see and _feel_ , over and over again, how trapped and miserable you've all been?"

Toriel held out her paws in a gesture of appeal. "Believe me, human, I do not know what you speak of—"

" _Don't tell me you don't know!"_ All the frustration and fear and hurt of the past forty years and more was boiling up now. Henry wanted to maintain a stoic composure but his sleep-starved brain would not cooperate. What little control he had left over his manner and his mood was abandoning him, and frenzied words came tumbling out. "Do you know how many hundreds of times I've seen you? Seen you sad, crying, screaming with rage? Do you know how many other terrible things I've seen? I've seen a suicidal orange dinosaur get attacked by a blob monster and I've seen a girl like a fish get stabbed in the face with a broken bottle, I've seen brokenhearted ghosts and monsters whispering heartbreaking wishes to flowers and I've seen your child die and turn to dust in front of me, just one anguish after another for forty fucking years, and the only consolation I've had that didn't come from a fucking pill, the _only_ consolation, was telling myself that at least it wasn't real, at least all that pain and misery was just in my fucking head, it couldn't possibly be real people suffering that much, it was just dreams, there's no reason to cry over dreams—"

He collapsed on the counter, utterly heedless of where he was, sobbing helplessly as hot tears flowed down his cheeks—decades' worth of tears all at once, tears for Toriel and her dead children and for the unhappy little scientist and for the one-eyed fish-woman and for all the monsters who thought they'd never see the sky again—tears for his dead mother whom he never knew and his dead grandmother whom he loved and even for his dead father whom he had so long hated—tears for himself, for an lonely life in a lonely town, bereft of love and friendship. He wept for what seemed like hours.

A gentle hand on his shoulder roused him from his breakdown. Henry looked up to see Frisk standing at the counter in front of him, their brown eyes shining. They pointed at Henry then swept their finger round, indicating a path round the counter and ending in front of it.

"You...you want me to come out from behind the counter?" Henry asked. Frisk vocalized their assent, nodding vigorously and smiling.

Henry Darzens wiped his eyes and stiffly rose to his feet, feeling every one of his more than sixty years, and slowly made his way around to the front of the counter to stand in front of Frisk. "All right, now what—oh—" The child put their arms around him in a warm embrace, holding it for many long moments.

Henry looked down at the child in some confusion, then at Toriel. Tears were still streaming down her muzzle, but she met Henry's inquiring look with a smile. "My child cannot bear to see anyone suffer and do nothing. They saw you in pain, and sought to help you in the best way they know."

Henry managed a weak smile back, then he lightly patted Frisk's head. "Thanks, kid. You have helped." Frisk released him from their embrace, with a happy sound and a kindly nod, and grabbed Toriel's paw again.

"What is your name, human?" asked Toriel. "I imagine that you would prefer me to address you as something other than 'human'."

"My name is Darzens, Henry Darzens. You can call me Henry, or Hank."

"Thank you, Henry. On your dreams...I promise you, they were no doing of mine nor of any other monster. We had no desire to torment you. Why would we? We did not even know of your existence."

"But then...why?" Henry rubbed his temples. "Where did they come from?"

"I can only venture a tentative guess," Toriel replied. "Monsters, I suspect, feel and express emotions far, far more powerfully than humans do. For us, feelings are literally magical." She gave a little laugh. "One of our writers once said that monsters' souls were made of love, hope, and compassion. Would that we monsters were all, in fact, possessed of such elemental purity...in any case, Henry, perhaps you are...perceptive to such powerful emotions in a way that most humans are not."

Henry looked at her sharply. "Didn't you say that to me before?"

Toriel looked a bit baffled. "No, I do not think so, Henry. How could I have ever spoken to you before?"

"Yeah, good point." Henry shook his aching head in a vain attempt to clear it. Weariness was beginning to overwhelm him.

"Henry, are you ill?" Toriel's eyes filled with concern.

"Um, not exactly. I, uh, well, the dreams were getting so bad I tried to go without sleep. I've been awake for going on four days straight now."

"Henry, you must not be so careless with your body and your health. Permit me to feel your heart."

Henry allowed Toriel to approach him and lay one of her softly padded paws on his chest. A calming warmth seemed to spread from the touch. His pounding heart relaxed into an even beat and his headache faded.

"Toriel...did you do that?" Henry asked, amazed.

Toriel smiled a little shyly. "I have a small amount of healing magic at my avail. What I can do with it is limited, but I was at least able to calm your racing heart and ease some of your tension. Do you feel better?"

"Yes, yes I do. Thank you." Then he yawned cavernously. "Oh, sorry. Feeling really drowsy all of a sudden..."

"Then I will leave you to sleep, Henry, and return tomorrow when you are rested. There is much I would discuss with you, since you are the first human we have encountered since we were freed from the Underground."

"Really! The first...that's kind of an honor, isn't it…" Henry yawned again. "Do you need a place to stay the night or something? The house that's furthest down the road as you go toward the mountain, the brick-red one on the left, that's totally empty. Nobody's lived there for a while now. Electricity's been shut off and it's probably dirty as hell inside but it's shelter…" He felt his head begin to droop, then caught himself. "Uh, sorry again."

"You have done nothing needing apology. Farewell, Henry Darzens." Toriel held out a paw for Henry to shake, and Henry accepted it. Frisk addressed Henry with an interrogative sound and held open their arms.

"You want to hug me again, Frisk? Sure, I'm glad to." He knelt down before Frisk and they embraced quickly. "Thanks again, kid." Frisk beamed.

Toriel took her child's hand and started toward the door, but halfway there she stopped and looked at Henry. "There is perhaps one more thing you can do for us tonight, Henry, before you rest. Do you sell any ingredients for baking?"

* * *

Henry Darzens staggered into his little bedroom and threw himself on the bed, not bothering to undress or set an alarm. A little voice in his mind was telling him he'd maybe forgotten to latch the front door but he was too far gone to care.

He'd sent Toriel and Frisk out the door with his own ingredients and his own foil pie dishes because the store didn't carry much of what she wanted. She'd insisted on paying for the items with a gold coin, a curious artifact bearing a horned and heavily bearded goatlike face on the obverse, and on the reverse the single word "HOPE". How Toriel was planning to bake anything in a house without electricity or gas Henry couldn't guess…

Within a minute he was fast asleep.

 _It was his own bedroom he saw, but the person asleep in the bed was the young child, Frisk, carefully tucked in and snoring in blissful peace. The door opened and Toriel quietly padded in, bearing on a paper plate a slice of pie. Henry imagined he caught a whiff of cinnamon. Toriel carefully laid the plate on the floor near the bed, smiled at the sleeping child, then just as quietly slipped out and shut the door. He wondered what sort of pie it was._

And at sunrise, when Henry woke to find a plate by his bedside holding a slice of pie and a slip of paper bearing the words _Thank You_ , he got to find out for himself.

The End


End file.
